Response to Gal Almogy: Superspreaders do matter.

In his comment, Almogy (2020) claims there is no evidence of ‘superpsreaders-begat-superspreaders’. To date, this is true, but there is also a lack of data that contradict that possibility. Almogy goes further in asserting that superspreaders are not playing an important role in the pandemic, basing his argument on the ‘latest available data’. However, he does not provide relevant references for such data.

On the contrary, building evidence from epidemiological (e.g. Frieden and Lee, 2020, Correa-Martinez et al., 2020, Liu et al., 2020), genetic (e.g. Gómez-Carballa et al., 2020, Miller et al., 2020), and modelling studies (e.g. Vespignani et al., 2020, Ndaïrou et al., 2020) argues in favour of the relevance of superspreaders in the spread of COVID-19. Recent studies have estimated low k values for negative binomial distributions from contact tracing data, suggesting that superspreading events are likely to have a very large role in driving the outbreak, and implying that most infected people produce only a few or no secondary cases (Adam et al., 2020, Zhang et al., 2020).